Saturday, April 24, 2010

There was phone interview and then a verbal offer of a job for John. Then there were a few days of haggling about money and health insurance. That haggling is still going on, we think. Nothing has come in writing yet.

But we are getting in gear, priming up. John has been fixing the sprinklers so that they'll work while we are away. Cars are as ready as they'll ever be. We're sort of making plans. Like, I want to bring my bicycle this time.

But we're holding back a bit too. Until the word comes in writing and a day to report to work is set, well, we just don't want to get our hopes up. We're getting used to thinking that something might happen, and then realizing that it won't.

"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."